All posts tagged ‘Up!’

Last week, Andy brought us news about the new Pixar game coming to the XBox, Kinect Rush: A Disney-Pixar Adventure. The new game brings some family favorites to the XBox in a game where you can participate in the worlds of The Incredibles, Up, Cars, Ratatouille and Toy Story.

The game features a scanning technology that actually looks at your hair, clothes and body’s features to create an Pixar-ized avatar that you can use in each of the five different Pixar worlds. In the game, players team up with Pixar characters and are challenged with solving puzzles, overcoming obstacles, and finding hidden secrets.

Happily, we have an exclusive first look at a new trailer for the game — premiering tomorrow — but available here today. The game looks like a lot of fun, so check out the trailer and then mark your calendars – Kinect Rush: A Disney-Pixar Adventurehits stores on March 20.

Kinect Rush ($49.99 on Amazon) is the next big game for the Xbox 360′s Kinect controller. We had some hands-on time with the game and spoke to Jay Ward from Pixar about the development. As well as finding out about the new Kinect Rush game we also put some questions to him about Pixar’s perspective on gender, guns and the more convoluted storyline of Cars 2.

Kinect Rush is more than Disneyland Adventures for Pixar films. It brings both ambition and common sense to steer the Cars, Toy Story and Incredibles themed exploration and adventuring in an engaging direction.

All but the most dedicated families will be struggling to keep up with Microsoft’s Kinect games (from $19.99 on Amazon). After the initial blush of titles like Kinect Adventures, Dance Central, and Kinect Sports came a range of third-party offerings that worked because they created genuinely new ways to play: Kinectimals, Fruit Ninja, Leedmees, and GunStringer to name a few.

Then came a second wave of Kinect games that stretched the technology further. Whether it was Disneyland Adventure‘s open world exploration, Once Upon A Monster‘s interactions for pre-schoolers or Just Dance 3‘s four player support, these games changed the definition of what a Kinect game could be.

These are not without their shortcomings or challenges. Each step forward into increased interactivity comes with more demands on the sometimes fussy Kinect controller. In the home it can take a while to get it setup perfectly, although the reward in terms of game-play is usually worth it.

I have no explanation for why the MythBusters didn’t get to this first. NBC’s Lester Holt reported yesterday that, as part of an upcoming National Geographic Channel series called How Hard Can It Be? that will premiere this fall, a group of people in Southern California launched a house into the air with balloons, just like Carl Fredricksen.

Well, OK, not just like Carl, because this group had to deal with the actual laws of physics. The house in question was only a frame and smaller than real houses, and the balloons used were of the weather variety, but still. The aircraft thus created was more than ten stories high, soared to a height of over 10,000 feet, and stayed up for about an hour.

Now I want to see what Adam, Jamie, Kari, Grant and Tory would do with the task.

YouTube user whoiseyevan, whose skillful and fun genre-and-era-blending projects comprise their own must-watch list for geeks and movie fans, has just released this stunning vision of Pixar’s Up in the live-action style of classic Disney flicks:

The tone of those 1960s movies – and believe it or not, this trailer pulls from nearly two dozen films spanning several decades – hits so close to the mark that it threw me back to memories of rainy-day recesses spent watching stuff like Blackbeard’s Ghostand That Darn Cat!

The GeekDads talk about Maker Faire, buying a cell phone for your kid, and the movie UP! Enjoy!

GeekDad.com is the parenting blog at Wired.com, edited by Ken Denmead and Chris Anderson. It is a community of like-minded geeky parents writing about our experiences raising our kids in the digital age, and about our obsessions with technology, family-friendly projects, and pop-culture. The GeekDads podcast is a bi-weekly discussion of anything and everything that impacts us as geeks and parents.